Carnation
by redexted
Summary: So it was that the New Architect created the new Universe, beginning with what used to be the Elysium. And inside there, on one particular garden bed, grows a small memory of his long-gone past. A post-Sunday short.


Disclaimer: All related characters and elements are (c) Garth Nix.

Note: This story contains major spoilers to the last book in the series. Please continue only if you have read that.

**Carnation**

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* * *

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"Cor," exclaimed Suzy. "I've never 'ad a _finer_ cup of tea than this!" She raised the delicate mother-of-pearl teacup in her hand, and downed its contents in one hearty gulp.

The New Architect glanced at her. The two of them were at the gold-paved square in the centre of the Elysium, seated across a table filled with an assortment of tea-things and pastries: porcelain pots, silver dessert forks, butter scones, ginger biscuits, and a tier of cupcakes topped with sugar whose hues shifted every minute or so. All of them were conjured to Suzy's wishes, after she insisted that the New Architect do something to celebrate her becoming Lady Sunday — or whatever title it was that she appointed herself after the rebirth of Creation. All of them, that was, save for a stack of sticky brown cubes on a silver platter at the far end of the table.

_Honey cakes,_ the New Architect knew. He could not remember why he created them, not even when he reached out to take a bite out of one of the cubes. They were very sweet indeed, at any rate.

"You make far better nosh now as New Architect, Art," Suzy said, in between mouthfuls of biscuit.

"Food is much simpler than the House itself," the New Architect replied. "It merely has to serve a brief purpose, not sustain itself for eternity."

"'S orright if you just say you're tired from building the Universe and all that, you know."

He laughed, a small laugh tilted towards the sky from which the morning sun shone, upon the crest of the hilltop. He was quite close to completing the reconstruction of the Incomparable Gardens. Six more demesnes — and only a few million more Secondary Realms — to go.

"I am not tired. At least, not yet." He folded his sunglasses into the collar of his vest: a woollen grey pullover worn over a crisp white shirt. "It has been less than a day — a day on Earth — since I became the New Architect. I shall make sure the Denizens this time are much more productive and versatile, so that they may ease my task of maintaining the House."

"So you're just lazy," Suzy decided, and the New Architect smiled.

She was only partly right, he thought. Most of the features in the Incomparable Gardens — including the Gazebo and the Arbour — had been faithfully rebuilt based on the blueprints in the Atlas. But a vast maze of garden beds, meant to be the Zoological Gardens, remained quite empty. There was nothing besides manicured shrubs and the skyscraping hedges that hid the Garden Path from view. No houses, and certainly no people looped within them.

A faint shadow crossed the New Architect's smile.

Suzy gave a rather impressive burp just then. "Oh right, where's Giac and Fred and Doc?" she asked. "You oughta bring them back already and let them 'ave some tea too!"

"Yes . . ." mused the New Architect. He tapped his chin with a finger. "I think they would like that very much."

Three white chairs appeared out of nowhere on either side of him and Suzy. A second later, the three aforementioned guests materialised on the chairs. Dr Scamandros looked the most disoriented of them all, the tattoos on his face a pattern of swivelling weathervanes. But they spiralled away into confetti as he straightened his glasses and saw the spread on the table. "Dear me," he said, leaning forward as the cup before him filled itself with steaming tea. "Whatever could the occasion be?"

"A birthday," Giac said absently — even though he could not be more right.

Fred Initial Numbers Gold, looking somewhat stiff in his bright blue and gold uniform, perked up in his seat. "A celebration of me becoming Lieutenant Keeper?" he suggested.

"Lieutenant Keeper of _what?_" asked Suzy. "There ain't no Front Door anymore."

"And there ain't no Army here for you to be General to either!"

For a long while Suzy stared at everyone across the table. "Blimey," she finally said, blinking. "So we aren't Piper's Children anymore, Fred."

"Then what exactly _are_ we?"

Suzy turned to Giac beside her, who stopped twiddling with the silver lacework along the rim of the tablecloth, and shook his head sheepishly. He looked at Dr Scamandros seated to his left, who in turn looked to _his_ left — right at a chair that was occupied until a scant two seconds ago.

"Art!" exclaimed Suzy.

– – –

The New Architect was sure he would be quite entertained by the banter that would have ensued among the four seated at the table. But a small part of his conscious had persuaded him to give himself a little time on his own. Time that was enough for him to ponder, but infinitesimal in the eternity he had to shape the rest of the Universe.

Or _re_shaping it, as it seemed to be. He had created Earth not long after the Elysium, even though the Atlas stated that the House, in its entirety, was all that existed in the very beginning of Time. But it was less out of procrastination than affection for the Secondary Realm, and he found himself unusually careful while detailing it.

He reached the Zoological Gardens just as the sun in the ceiling sky dipped behind a cluster of hillocks at the far horizon. Countless plots of garden spread out before him in a grid, all of them nondescript in their blankets of clipped grass: a uniform, lush green that rippled like waves in the fabricated breezes of the Gardens. But all of them were distinctive from one another in the smallest of ways. There were patches of bramble dotting one garden square, desert marigolds bordering another, and the tiny brown umbrella of a mushroom standing alone in the heart of yet another.

All of them seemed to have grown quite happily on their own, regardless of what had once — or could have — been built upon them.

One particular square, however, stood out amongst all the others. It was unlabelled like those around it, yet stark in its lack of features besides the grass base. For some reason he did not know the New Architect remembered it well, and words echoed across his mind as he gazed down at the garden.

_Bed 27. Pot 5._

"No," he murmured. He closed his eyes.

The Atlas, now permanently imprinted within his memory, seemed to stir to life upon the thought of the name. It flipped itself to an empty page, and the same words appeared across the top of the page in sleek inked script.

_Bed 27. Pot 5._

For a moment the invisible hand ceased writing. Then it went on:

_An exhibit in the Zoological Gardens, the Incomparable Gardens. Retrieved from Earth, Secondary Realm No. 11097. Installation: One house, four storeys. Specimen(s): One mortal woman—_

"_No,_" said the New Architect, in a firmer voice this time.

The covers of the Atlas slammed shut, and it melted away into the deepest reaches of his mind. But in its place came another image, soaring from the darkness and materialising into being as a single ribbon of white light, twisting and curling until it formed a helix around the New Architect. Shadows and shapes fluttered across the ribbon like an old filmstrip, then slowed down until he could make out individual pictures on each segment — all of them familiar, yet only vaguely so.

He saw a brick-red house, four floors high, and a white car parked before it. He saw a group of teenagers with hair of vastly different shades, laughing and nudging one another at the elbows as they crowded into a large, cosy couch. He saw a man strumming a guitar and singing, with one foot perched upon the edge of a wooden porch. And — most clearly of all — he saw a woman standing by an open doorway. She wore a long white coat, and a smile on her face as she spread her arms out towards him.

The New Architect slowly raised a hand. He opened his mouth to speak, but that last imagery flickered away along with the others, and fused to become a single patch of white light, pulsing gently against the darkness of Nothing.

_Once more,_ whispered the New Architect. His hand reached out further towards the ball of light. _Let me see it just once more._

Four points rose out from the light like the cardinal points on a compass, until they formed the corners of a square that righted itself in mid-air. At the precise moment it did the glow flicked itself off, leaving behind only a thin frame and revealing, within the frame, a single pinpoint of light that burned gold in semi-darkness.

He had opened a window in the air.

And he was looking through it into the Realms, the only one he had created thus far.

– – –

_It was night-time, with stars flecked across the sky like fine sand, spilling onto a patchwork of houses clustered around the same street. All of them were dark, their occupants deep in slumber. But one of the houses was lit — a second floor window, it seemed — and the New Architect drifted closer, silently._

_The lit window was open. It led to a bedroom where a pale-haired girl sat in bed, holding a steaming mug close to her face. Her lips were moving: she was talking to an old lady, who sat beside her in a wooden chair and listened as she held against her lap a plate littered with crumbs. In the warm glow of the bedside lamp between the two of them the girl's eyes shone, as she gestured and spoke of a story that the New Architect could not hear. But there was also a tiredness about them — they were eyes that had seen too much, in too short a span of time._

_The New Architect passed the window, and reached another a little way to its left. This one had its curtains drawn; he simply drifted through it, landing in a room that was quite alike the one before. It was plain, save for a rucksack lying on a small desk that stood against one wall, and someone else on the bed. A boy who looked all too familiar to the New Architect, even in the darkness of the room: _himself.

No, _said the New Architect, to himself._ He is Arthur Penhaligon, the boy whom I used to be . . . A mortal boy.

_Arthur was sitting up in bed, dressed in jeans and a sweater that looked too big on him. His eyes stared out of the window — into the New Architect's face — as he hugged his knees to his chin. One hand was curled tight against the denim of his jeans; the other clutched a small drawstring bag sewn from shimmering fabric. But he drew in his breath just then — and the next moment he was crying, tears streaming down his face even as he tried to dry them with his sleeves._

_And somewhere amidst the boy's sobbing, the New Architect heard one word, whispered over and over, and strained with such anguish and sadness that even he felt it like a searing blade drawn through his very self._

– – –

The New Architect opened his eyes. He was kneeling before the empty garden bed, one hand against on the ground as though having leaned upon it for support. The grass between his fingers felt prickly and cool, already dewing in the falling evening of the Incomparable Gardens.

Absently he brushed his other hand across his cheeks: there was not a single tear staining them. It surprised him little, and he smiled to himself as he slowly stood up once more.

There was no need for Suzy or anyone else to know what he saw, the New Architect realised. They all belonged to his yesterday and — for he was the one who made it so — yesterday never once existed.

He made his way back towards Elysium along the Garden Path, slipping his sunglasses back above his forehead as he usually did. He had a tea party to return to, and Suzy might hurl fewer tirades at him for missing her coronation as Lady Sunday and suchlike _if_ he looked just a little tidier.

Behind him, in the empty grassed space where a brick-red house used to stand, something began to stir. A tiny pair of leaves pushed themselves out from the very spot in the ground where the New Architect's hand lay only minutes ago. It grew as though fast-forwarded in time, throwing out rosettes of new leaves around its stem, which bore a single bud at its very tip. In the last rays of the fabricated sun the bud slowly unfurled, petal by blushing petal.

And at last it stood in full bloom — a carnation of pale red, whose every petal flowed with sunlight and the whispered words of a mortal boy interwoven into one another, in the same way each of the seven segments of a Will could have assumed its form, once upon a Time.

_-fin-_

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I happened to finish reading _Lord Sunday _on Mother's Day this year, which was rather poignant for me. Hence this story.

(Out of truth, in testament and against all trouble. The Will is at last done.)


End file.
